A Look at U.K. Food Safety After Brexit

However, concerns over food safety standards have been raised because these “corrections” can be made by government agency ministers without approval by Parliament and can go far beyond their intended scope. Calling it “the devil in the details,” a recent report by the UK Trade Policy Observatory—a partnership between the University of Sussex and the Royal Institute of International Affairs—identifies several areas where the UK’s post-Brexit food safety rules “fall short of the level of protection currently provided by the EU.”

The report discusses several particularly worrisome areas, among them GMO authorization and labeling, food additive authorization and monitoring, and microbiological food safety. For example, U.K. agency ministers can use the Brexit statutory instruments to develop and amend guidance for sampling, testing, and standards for GMO product labeling thresholds. While consultation with FSA is required, this process replaces functions of the EU reference laboratories, said the report.

While Brexit statutory instruments transfer many EU provisions regarding food additives to U.K. law, they also revoke EU requirements to monitor and report food additive consumption and make substantive changes to regulations for certain additives. “This change suggests that the government intends to cease monitoring the consumption of food additives, which would be a significant change of policy,” the report states.

‘Chlorinated Chicken’

One controversial area is microbiological food safety. The report states that U.K. officials can abandon the EU prohibition on food derived from washing animal carcasses with anything but water (or a lactic acid solution for beef). This can lead the way to importing “chlorinated chicken”—a euphemism for the practice of cleaning raw poultry with chlorinated water in an effort to kill bacteria, such as Campylobacter, Salmonella, and Listeria.

The U.S. and many other countries use chlorinated water, but the EU banned it in 1997 over food safety concerns. Since then, many studies have concluded that the practice is not harmful to consumers (rinsing salad in chlorinated water is common, even throughout Europe), but it isn’t necessarily as effective as many assume. Other Brexit-related concerns involve residue levels of pesticides on U.S. agricultural products, the use of antibiotics and hormones in U.S. cattle, and the use of the chemical ractopamine to make U.S. pigs leaner and meatier.

Following a post-Brexit Cabinet shuffle in February 2020, the U.K.’s new Environment Secretary, George Eustice, said the government had no plans to change food safety laws, but would not rule out the possibility of accepting U.S. food standards as part of a trade deal. He noted that most U.S. poultry producers now use a lactic acid solution to wash raw chicken, instead of chlorine.

Nevertheless, it is chlorinated chicken that has become a rallying cry for those opposed to Brexit (the “remainers”) and for political opponents in the Labor Party, as well as among those who advocate the adoption of EU standards into British law. A recent survey found that more than four-fifths (81 percent) of the British public are worried about meat quality standards being relaxed in pursuit of trade deals with the U.S. and other countries.

The survey, commissioned by Unison, the largest trade union in the U.K., found that more than half (52 percent) believe government meat quality standards should be tightened after Brexit, one-third (34 percent) say the U.K. should maintain its current laws, and 3 percent say rules should be relaxed. The poll of more than 2,000 people was taken amid concerns that the government could agree to import chicken washed in chlorine or lactic acid in exchange for a U.S. deal.

Still, the likelihood of a major negative impact on food safety following Brexit has increased from “possible” to “probable,” according to a report from Public Health Wales, the national public health agency. “There is stronger, direct evidence of a potential negative impact on food standards in the form of published United States (U.S.) trade objectives,” the report states.